mussolet’s Reviews > A Month in the Country > Status Update

"And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart - knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.
We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever - the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass."

"The first feeling of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it is too late."

"To say the least, this was embarrassing. In part, because people one doesn't care for, even dislike, make most of us feel uneasy when they appeal against their sentence."

"We didn't really know each other when we married. Who does? For that matter, who knows all that much about anyone even after twenty years in the same house? We only show what we care to and so it's a bit of a guessing game, isn't it? And if the other person doesn't care to answer "Right" or "Wrong", guessing it stays."

"Ah, those days ... for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young."

"Most country people had a deep-rooted disinclination to sleep away from home and a belief that, like as not, to sojourn amongst strangers was to fall among thieves. It was the way they always had lived and, like their forefathers, they traveled no further than a horse or their own legs could carry them there and back in a day."

"'What are your feelings about growing old [...]?'
It wasn't an inconsequential question: I could tell that he really wanted an answer, a second opinion.
'I can't imagine,' I said. 'I mean I can't imagine it happening to me,' I said. 'It's too far away now. Well, do you wonder? You know what it was like. There can't have been many of us who thought we'd need to worry about growing old.'"

"surely we shouldn't be required [...] to justify the ethic of our labour? Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide."

"it had never occured to me that too big a house might have the same appalling drawbacks as too small a one, and only the reflection that I'd no home art all [...] shielded me from black depression."

"[...] dishes Mrs Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake, who ... Sometimes I'd share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology."